Lallan Chowdhari, the Indian labourer whose body was lying in a UAE hospital morgue for almost 15 days, will finally be flown to India on Tuesday (25 August).
Chowdhari was staying at the the Ajman labour accommodation in the UAE and had died on 9 August of heat-stroke (heat-related brain hemorrhage), according to a Khaleej Times report.
Several legal issues, including the high cost of formalities (almost Rs 2 lakh) for bringing his body back to India caused the delay. Though usually the process takes only two to three days, the fact that his employer had gone bankrupt made matters worse.
As news spread on social media of the abysmal living conditions of the labour camp where he lived and died, hundreds of Indians in the UAE came forward to help him.
It was reported that Chowdhari, an employee of Essa Engineering and Marine Services LLC, along with 220 of his colleagues in the Ajman camp, went without food and essential supplies for several months.
Khaleej Times journalist Dhanusha Gokulan told IBTimes India that the Indian community in the UAE played a key role in helping his family bring back the body.
"The company paid for everything and even the Indian consulate offered to pay for his repatriation. But the most helpful were the Indian residents living here," Gokulan said.
His body will be flown from the UAE on Tuesday (25 August) to India and will be taken to Rajasthan for the last rites.
Indian Workers in UAE
Since the recent UAE visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who took time out from his schedule to visit Abu Dhabi's ICAD Residential City - a labour camp home to about one lakh migrant labourers from India - hopes have risen that the conditon of workers would improve.
There are an estimated 2.6 million Indians in the UAE, of which only 15 to 20% are professionals, while the rest are mostly blue collar workers, or labourers. Though the UAE claims that the situation has improved, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) has a different story to tell.
In its report released in February this year, HRW noted that complaints of passports of migrant workers being withheld so that they don't switch jobs, mass firing and workers being deported for protesting still persist.
